Dept. Justice Sends Anti-Semitic Blog Post to Immigration Judges

By: Jackson Carter

· Domestic Policy

On Monday August 19th the Department of Justice accidentally sent a brief containing anti-semetic material to employees of the department’s immigration review office. Department of Justice spokeswoman Kathryn Mattingly said in a statement after her review of the emails, which contained an anti-semetic slur and other anti-immigration views, “we [the DoJ] have determined that the sampling was over inclusive and contained non-news sources. EOIR [Executive Office for Immigration Review] will no longer be distributing a daily news briefing to its staff. EOIR strongly condemns anti-Semitism and white nationalism. Those hateful beliefs do not reflect the views of EOIR employees and the Department of Justice.” After making this announcement, the DoJ announced that it would not renew its contract with the private, Florida based company TechMIS which was contracted to create the daily briefs.

In response to the DoJ’s announcement TechMIS CEO Steve Mains had this to say, “we [TechMIS] provide the entire universe of news about EOIR, and then what’s distributed is up to them...We provide it to them, they go through it with a fine-tooth comb and decide what they want to keep, what they want to remove and if they have any issues…”

This controversy arrived the same week that President Trump faced media backlash for calling Jews who voted for Democrat politicians “greatly disloyal”. For the time being, according to Kathryn Mattingly, “the Communications and Legislative Affairs Division will no longer distribute a daily news briefing within EOIR” The Washington Post also reported that “[EOIR employees] were given instructions for how to sign up for a different department-wide briefing service, if they wished to receive those notifications.”